This panel seeks to examine global, national, and local immigration policies affecting refugees and migrants. International refugee policy set forth by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) specifies criteria that individuals must meet to obtain official refugee status. Decisions about whether or not migrants meet these criteria is firmly determined by evidence they provide, making question about what constitutes appropriate evidence vital. Furthermore, varying policies at the national level and policies of organizations such as the European Union add to the complexity of identifying, resettling, and ensuring proper care for refugees due to differing immigration apparatuses.

The implementation of current migration policies often diverges greatly among national and local governments, frequently affecting the provision of vital services to this population. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) likewise facilitate resettlement of refugees and often attempt to fill gaps left by governmental and international support; therefore, we must examine the policy and organizational structure of NGOs, and identify the disparities in policy and practice.

We welcome papers from both academic presenters and practitioners that critically analyze policies, praxes, and discourses affecting refugees and migrants from a variety of backgrounds and nations, including “traditional” refugees, asylum-seekers, unaccompanied minors, environmental migrants, economic migrants, victims of human trafficking, and migrants fleeing widespread violence who do not typically qualify as refugees.

As most of you know from multiple sources, the basic deadline for panel and paper proposals for the November AAA meeting in Minneapolis is April 15. All the program materials and forms are on the AAA web site at:

Note that there are a variety of different formats available. Also remember that you can submit individual papers, which are then organized into panels by us. That approach has yielded some good panels in the past.

As the program chair for this year, please let me know if you have any questions or problems. Also, feel free to use ASAP communications (list, web, Facebook, Twitter) to share panel proposals or just ideas.

Although we will use Facebook and Twitter for routine information about our activities, our main goal is to use these more interactive formats for active discussion of anthropology-of-policy issues. For this year, we will do so by picking bimonthly topics that seem promising or timely. We will have some postings on what we think are useful resources and pressing questions, but the main goal is to open up comments from all of you. We have chosen refugees as the first topic since we know we have had a high level of interest. Future topics are wide open. Feel free to make suggestions.

On either Facebook or Twitter, feel free to comment on the current topic, on the overall process we are using, or on how to make that process more inclusive, useful, or interesting.

The official launch of our first topic will be on March 1. But we are already live on both Facebook and Twitter.

Please keep in mind the possibility of Community Engagement Grants and Section Waivers in organizing your panels for this fall’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. Instructions are in the following two files:

The Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP) invites submissions for the 2016 Graduate Paper Prize. ASAP awards a prize of $250 annually for the best graduate student paper on any aspect of the anthropology of policy.

Papers must be based upon original ethnographic fieldwork. A committee of three ASAP board members will read and assess the papers based upon the originality and depth of their empirical research and their contribution to the field; organization, quality, and clarity of writing; and cogency of argument. A condensed version of the winning paper will be published in the ASAP Anthropology News column and linked on the ASAP website.

Manuscripts should be sent to Jennifer Hubbert ([email protected]) as MS Word files, double-spaced, with one file for the text itself (with author’s name removed) and another file for the cover page (see details below).

General eligibility criteria:

Students must be in a degree-granting program (including MA or PhD) at the time of their submission.

Students must be members of ASAP.

Paper must be the original work of the student and previously unpublished.

Paper must have been written in the current 2015-2016 academic year (i.e., since August 2015)

Limit of one submission per student.

Manuscript format criteria:

All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced.

Maximum length for the body of the text 7,000 words.

All submissions must follow the standard anthropological format for citations, endnotes, and “References Cited” as outlined in the American Anthropologist style guide.

Authors must include a title and an abstract of 250 words or less on the first page of the paper.

The author’s name, mailing address, e-mail address, telephone number, university affiliation and academic status (MA or PhD) should appear typed on a cover sheet separate from the manuscript. The author’s name should not appear elsewhere on the manuscript.

The paper must be submitted to Jennifer Hubbert by April 30, 2016. No late entries will be accepted and submissions will not be returned. Outside of the award itself, comments on the papers will not be provided to authors.

Entries that do not conform to the above requirements will not be considered.

CWA (Council for World Anthropologies) is able to offer modest support for (some) travel expenses for international participants at the annual AAA meetings — so that panels can “internationalize” sessions by including participants from outside the United States. Please keep this opportunities in mind in planning sessions!

The details are below.

All best,
Janine

Janine R. Wedel
University Professor, George Mason University
President, Association for the Anthropology of Policy

Greetings. We’re writing to you from our positions as Co-Chairs of the Committee on World Anthropologies (CWA). We want to ask if you would please forward this message to all Section heads as the CWA is once again able to offer modest support for (some) travel expenses for international participants at the annual AAA meetings. We would like word to get out now so that panel organizers are encouraged to consider “internationalizing” sessions by including participants from outside the United States. Our deadline for submission of requests is April 1, 2016. Section heads or panel organizers should submit the following to Alexandre Duchene ([email protected]), cc-ing Florence Babb ([email protected]), and Carla Fernandez ([email protected]):

Request for CWA travel support for international participants at 2016 AAA

1. Name and contact information of person submitting request:
2. Date of submission of request to CWA:
3. Title, abstract, and participants in your proposed AAA session:
4. Name, paper title, and abstract for international participant’s presentation on AAA panel:
5. Short bio for international participant, showing what s/he will add to the session:
6. Short description of how the session relates to the mission of CWA:
7. Itemized budget for proposed international participant’s travel (giving departure city, airline, and current airfare to Minneapolis, MN), and indication of need (how much of the travel expense will be covered by the participant’s home institution?):
8. What AAA Section is the likely sponsor of this session, and do you wish to have CWA consider co-sponsorship? (We have a very limited number of co-sponsorships.)

Thanks very much. We welcome early requests, queries, and other communications!

We’re inviting you to submit a paper for this year’s European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference in Milan, Italy, July 20-23, 2016, to Panel (P019): “Emerging Contestations of Abortion Rights: New Hierarchies, Political Strategies, and Discourses at the Intersection of Rights, Health and Law” that Silvia De Zordo (U. of Barcelona), Claudia Mattalucci (U. Bicocca, Milan, Italy) and I organised. Our panel is accepted, and paper abstracts can be submitted here:

This panel, which has a strong policy component, may be of interest to some of you or to your students, PhD students, colleagues, so feel free to share with your networks and to circulate widely.Panel Organizers:

This panel engages with the theme of power in relation to both the topic of abortion rights and policies, as well as with the trajectory of anthropological engagement with this topic. Women’s right to legal abortion in many nations in Europe and elsewhere around the world has been fraught with uncertainties. In some nations it is facing increasingly significant challenges since its widespread legalization in the post-World War II era. Legislation restricting rights and access to abortion has been introduced and passed in some European nations, especially in Eastern Europe, and in the United States where restrictions are increasing at an unprecedented rate and constitute the litmus test for politicians in electoral politics. Furthermore, serious obstacles to abortion access are increasingly evident in procedural barriers and conscience-based refusals by healthcare providers, while anti-abortion/pro-life movements are working with renewed vigor. Yet, there have been relatively few ethnographic studies of abortion qua abortion since Faye Ginsburg’s pathbreaking study, Contested Lives (1989), published over 25 years ago. This panel will examine the articulation of abortion politics with new social formations across moral, medical, political, and scientific fields in 21st century. We consider how the study of abortion provides a sharply focused lens onto broader theoretical debates around: gender and personhood; the legitimacy of scientific knowledge; neoliberalism; the role of women and women’s rights in a liberal democracy; church-state relations; and social justice movements. This panel also maps possible directions for future empirical and theoretical analyses in this enduring and contested anthropological research arena